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Showing posts from January, 2019

What Do You Mean by Average?

Describing something as average is typically innocuous. But sometimes it can be deceiving. Take a look at the definition of average  and you'll see a typical amount , or  common ,  ordinary . When it comes to numbers and data it is also tied to what is called the  arithmetic mean   (sometimes just mean  for short) -- which is adding up a bunch of values and dividing by the number of values you have. Key questions here: When are these ideas in alignment and when does it fail? To help get to the bottom of this, at least from a statistical point of view, is to first talk about resistant statistics  -- which are summarizations of data that are not highly influenced by individual values. Let's also have  a quick reminder of  the  median   or  value that splits the data set into an upper and lower half when the data is ordered. The mean of a data set is not  resistant to extreme values, while the median  is, and we'll look into why this is the case and what this has to